


at extremum terrae

by RecoveringTheSatellites



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst - but also HOPE, Don't copy to another site, F/M, Oneshot, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2020-03-26 09:10:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19002739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RecoveringTheSatellites/pseuds/RecoveringTheSatellites
Summary: "at extremum terrae" (latin: at the end of the earth)We make the difference between living and surviving.





	at extremum terrae

**Author's Note:**

> This goes out to the wonderful and brilliant profdanglais (@profdanglaisstuff), without whom this story would have landed in that void of jumbled letters where the broken stories go.  
> She doesn't just make me better, she makes me want to *become* better, and i cannot thank her enough.  
> Without her there would not have been a story.

  
  
  


_ “Human happiness does not seem to be included in the design of creation. It is only we, with our capacity to love that give meaning to the indifferent universe.” _

_ \- Crimes and Misdemeanors - _

  
  
  


Marking time has become her purpose.  It’s been 752 days.

107 weeks.

25 months.

2 years and 22 days.

Since the world ended.

  
  
  


In the end it had not taken much to bring civilization to its knees.  Just the loss of power. 

The grids went down everywhere, all at once.  As if all the lines were cut.

Communication had been cut off everywhere, all at once.  As if the satellites had disappeared.

The world was plunged into darkness and silence, and then it went straight to hell.

With the absence of power and the absence of signal came the absence of information.  There had been no news. No context of any kind. For a little while there were short-wave radio cries of  _ WhatIsHappening? _ and pleas for help.  Without an answer.

Within a frighteningly short time it spelled the end of infrastructure, of money, of government, of order.  The end of civility and purpose and the meaning of life.

What remained was chaos, and humanity reacted the way it always does: Survival of the fittest.

 

And thus civilization ended.  In blood and bedlam.

  
  
  


Emma rolls her left shoulder as she exits her room and puts her knife back in its sheath strapped to her side.  Her arm still hurts, and 752 days is a long time to spend just surviving.

Just marking time.

She enters the vast main room of the structure and sits down next to Mary Margaret and Ruby on the concrete floor.  Two years ago seventeen of them sought refuge in this lumber factory. For nearly two years they have carved their existence from the shreds of what remains and the bare bones of the earth.

They chose the factory for two reasons: 

It was easy to fortify.

And it was next to a river.

Their survival is built on defense and water.

They are only eleven now.

 

Mary Margaret smiles at Emma while her hands expertly check her bow for wear and weakness.  Ruby barely glances up from where her knife is whittling countless arrows. 

The stockpiles of lumber in this factory have been a lifesaver many times over.

Ruby hasn’t spoken a word since her wife went out on patrol over a month ago and never came back.  But she makes arrows with a vengeance, silent and deadly, through all the hours she is awake.

Emma puts a brief hand on Ruby’s shoulder and leans back, looking at Mary Margaret.

 

All three of them have the same short hair, hacked off with sharp knives near the scalp, growing in shaggy.  Their hair has long ago become bow strings.

 

Mary Margaret catches her gaze as she puts down her bow and picks up her husband’s.  She and David never got to marry officially under the law, but there is no more law, so Emma married them under a barred factory window.  Mary Margaret is very pregnant these days, and Emma is both worried and furious.

_ ThisIsNoWorldForChildren _

She tries not to let either show.

 

When Mary Margaret puts down David’s bow she pauses for a moment and rubs her swollen side, and for a brief moment Emma can see the person Mary Margaret used to be.  

A lifetime ago they were college roommates who became good friends.

A lifetime ago Emma drove up to Storybrooke to celebrate Mary Margaret’s engagement.  

There was a backyard filled with laughing people in lawn chairs and Chinese lanterns and punch with a kick.  For a long, painful moment Emma is back inside that evening, half-drunk already and waiting for--- 

waiting for----

 

Her breath catches, like it always does, and tears spring to her eyes, the way they always do.

She can’t think of him.  Can’t even let herself think his name.

He was going to drive up that evening.  Then the lights went out, and the first few hours there was still laughter, and jokes about how their party must have overloaded the grid, and no one had known that it was the end of life as they knew it.

Emma had not known that she would never see him again; had just worried that he was driving on dark city streets without traffic lights.

 

She breathes down the pain that still comes so sharp, that will not lessen even with all the days that have passed since, and Mary Margaret puts a hand on her arm.  She’s a different person now, they are all different people now, but the urge to comfort is still with her. 

Or maybe she feels guilty.  She and David are the reason Emma was not by his side when bedlam hit.

It took Emma a long time to forgive them.

She has never forgiven herself.

 

She smiles at Mary Margaret, who hands her David’s bow while Emma picks up her own, and stuffs arrow after arrow into her quiver.  Then she gets up and walks towards what they refer to as the Main Gate. Otherwise known as a barred steel door. David is already waiting for her.

It’s their turn to go on patrol.

They leave without saying good-bye.  They have learned not to say that anymore.

  
  
  
  


David and Emma split up at the dropoff a mile from the perimeter.  There’s a ravine on the left and what used to be a walkway of steps on the right, and it’s easier to separate and check each alone and then meet at the bottom.

David takes the ravine.  He always does. It will take him twice as long as Emma to get down, but he doesn’t mind, and she is grateful for it.  Because out here she is afraid of heights.

Inside the factory walls she is the leader -- tough and fearless and infallible.  

David is a former cop who taught all those who had never held a gun how to shoot.  Back in the days when they still had bullets. He knew how to fortify the factory and how to make explosives from kitchen ingredients and household cleaners.  

Mary Margaret is a former elementary school teacher who turned out to be their best tracker and the only person who knew how to make bows and shoot arrows.  As well as set traps. For both game and attackers.

They would each have made capable leaders.  But they were also together, which split their loyalties, and so they refused.  Making Emma the leader by default. Because there was no one else to lead.

And because Emma is alone.

  
  


Emma takes a deep breath and stares down the ravine. She forces herself to do so every time.  And every time her stomach flips. This is one fear she cannot conquer.

David puts a hand on her shoulder and tells her to stop, like he always does.

But he also knows that Emma needs these moments of weakness, of being  _ JustHuman _ , out here, away from everyone.

Because sometimes she buckles under the sheer weight of hopelessness and sadness and loneliness.  Under the weight of all these eyes, staring in fear and animosity and apprehension at every crisis they encounter, every attack they survive, every decision she makes and then has to live with, alone.

Under the sheer tonnage of missing.  Him.

David knows, and picks her up every time.  Refuses to let her slide into madness or apathy, and never says a word to the others.

She has no words big enough to tell him what it means to her, and he doesn’t need any.

He knows.

 

Emma turns away from the ravine and David smiles at her and nods.  And Emma takes the walkway again.

 

She waits several minutes before she enters the clearing at the bottom, silent and watchful.  She has learned the hard way not to assume anything; least of all the absence of people in places which look empty.  A scar down her left cheek, from her eyebrow to her jawbone attests to to her lesson in patience.

But all remains quiet and still, and so she slowly starts making her way down to the stream.

 

Next to the stream lies a canteen.

Open and empty.

 

Her head whips around, but the clearing is deserted.  Her hand reaches out and suddenly a voice comes from behind the large willow beside her, thin and weak and anxious.  “Please don’t take that. It’s the only one I have.”

She takes a step forward and turns her head and then her eyes come to rest on a man.

He’s in bad shape.

He’s ragged and skinny, his long hair matted, his face obscured by a dirty full beard.  He is pale and sweaty and shivering, leaning against the tree trunk with his head tilted back and his eyes nearly closed.  His left hand is wrapped in a dirty bandage.

The canteen has obviously fallen from his other hand some time ago.

 

Emma kneels down next to him.

And then he opens his eyes.

Blue eyes.

They stare at nothing and then they find her face and then they  _ focus _ .  See her.

Emma stops breathing and pushes his hair back and her entire body starts to shake.

And then he whispers one word.

Her name.

 

She nearly faints right then and there.

  
  
  


  
  
  


“The hand has to come off.”

 

Dr. Whale is by far the most valuable member of their ragtag band of survivors.  He made them raid the hospital even before they raided the stores for food and supplies.  He knew where everything was kept. Made them a list of what they should take and what they should leave behind.  They have real surgical instruments and real medical supplies and real medication and they each owe him their lives many, many times over.

When Emma and David haul a strange, feverish, unconscious man into the compound, he does not bat an eyelash.  When he peels back the dirty bandage Emma nearly throws up. The hand beneath is broken and mangled and infected.  It smells of death.

 

Whale looks at Emma with an expression halfway between empathy and resolve, and when she draws breath to protest, he cuts her off.

“It’s lose the hand or lose him.”  His face hardens. “And it might be too late for either, just so you know.”

“Do it,” she whispers.  “Just please---”  _ Please don’t lose him.  Whatever you do please, don’t lose him. _

She can’t say it.

So she just repeats, “Please.”

Whale nods and says, “He’ll need antibiotics.  And they’re all rationed out.”

It’s true.  Certain medication was rationed right at the start, divided equally among all of them.  Whale received double the amount, because his survival gave the others a better chance. After each person they lost, their rations were divided back into the group.

It is everyone’s understanding that as soon as an allotment runs out, each will have to survive without.  Or die.

They have lost one person this way already.

 

“Give him mine.”

He looks at Emma.  “Are you sure?”

She nods, her lips a thin line.

“Give him mine.”   _ Please. _

Whale nods again.  “I need at least three men to hold him down.  And Belle.”

 

Emma watches as David leads two of their best hunters, Robin and Will, into the room.  Belle follows - a petite brunette whose elderly husband died during their first winter, the first victim of rationed antibiotics.  He had staunchly refused to take any of his wife’s. 

Belle was a librarian back in the days of civility, and over the course of the past two years has been a fount of useful information.  She has also turned out to be the least squeamish and the most capable in assisting medical procedures, out of all of them.

 

Emma doesn’t want to get in the way, but she also can’t leave.  So she sits on the floor, half under the steel table Whale is scrubbing down, and takes his right hand.

It’s lifeless in hers.

But it’s warm.

She wraps it in both of hers, and presses it to her cheek.

She still can’t bring herself to say his name.  Not out loud.

Not inside her own head.

All she thinks, all she has, all she is, is  _ please _ .

Whale’s voice calls out from behind her, “hold him down fast.  Belle, ready the clamps.”

And Emma closes her eyes and lets the tears fall.

_ Please. _

_ Please. _

_ Please. _

  
  
  
  
  
  


When he wakes up he has no idea where he is.

But it feels like--- a bed.

_ A bed _ .

It’s soft and warm and  _ inside _ , inside a structure, and there is something pressed up against him and a hand holding his, and then he moves his left arm and passes out.

 

The next time he wakes up, he vomits.  There is so much pain.

The time after that he cycles through sweating and freezing and sweating and freezing and then more vomiting.

There’s a soft voice, sometimes, and fingers laced through his own, and they never let go of his hand.

The following time, rough arms pull him upright into a sitting position, and that soft voice comes again, coaxes him to drink.

Pinpricks of sharp light burn his eyes.  Over and over.

It goes on like a carousel of colors and exhaustion, but the voice stays, the voice stays, and it is good that it does.

  
  


He opens his eyes what feels like a lifetime later, and sees a face.

Her face.

Her face.  Next to him.

Her eyes are closed and she is breathing slow, even breaths, and he’s sure he is dreaming.

Dreaming or dead.

Because it can’t be.  It can’t be.

Life is not that fair.

 

Doubt and fear and hope swirl together in his mind, and before he can stop himself he whispers, “Emma?”

And she opens her eyes.

So very, very green.

She opens her mouth, but no sound comes out.

She blinks and tears start rolling down her face, big, fat drops, but she still makes no sound.

Her face is scarred and her cheekbones are sharp edges and she is holding his hand, crying in silence.

 

“Love?” he says, and it breaks her dam.  She leans forward and  _ sobs _ , and he tries to put his arms around her, and nearly screams with the pain of it.

Her head snaps back up and she grabs his left shoulder.  “Lie still,” she says. “Oh please, lie still.”

 

She is here.

She’s here and she’s real and he isn’t dead.  Death could not possibly be this painful.

Or this wonderful.

She’s  _ here _ .

  
  


There is so much he wants to tell her.

How he was caught on the freeway when the power went out.  How he didn’t even notice at first. How he pulled over to get gas and was caught in the first wave of fear and confusion.  How he spent hours trying to get information from increasingly frightened people, trying to get a signal to reach Emma, trying to keep his own panic at bay.

How he fought his way up to Storybrooke, past hordes of marauders and woods thicker than wilderness.  Months and months and months on foot. Getting lost over and over. Staying away from roads and all urban areas.  Breaking into abandoned cabins and small-town stores long ago looted, picked clean to the bones.

How he nearly got caught and killed trying to steal a map from a library.

How he had to turn around time and again because of cliffs he couldn’t scale or raging rivers he couldn’t cross.  Almost a year’s worth of detours in his wake.

Nearly starving too many times to count, because he’s a sailor, not a hunter.

 

But driven.  Driven all this time by her face, by her voice, by the memories of her soft smile and the warm expression she keeps just for him.  Getting to her became his sole purpose, the end all and be all of his existence; it was that, or die trying, or slowly go mad.

So he plowed on, dogged and stubborn, forever putting one foot in front of the other.

 

He shudders when he thinks of how a posse of raiders finally caught up to him in Storybrooke; Storybrooke where she should have been but wasn’t, and where he spent so many days fighting his fear and despair, looking for signs, looking for clues.

 

Finding nothing.

 

They caught up to him and he barely escaped with a bullet hole through his hand, and in his despair and his anguish he followed the river, because he was out of ideas and there was nowhere else to go.

How he followed when a stream branched off into the woods, because the river was too much out in the open, and he was already delirious with fever.

He thought he would breathe his last breath in that clearing, thinking of her, and ready to die.

 

And now he is here.  Wherever ‘here’ is.

It doesn’t matter, because  _ she  _ is here.

 

He wants to ask her where they are and how they got here.

He wants to ask how she got the scar on her cheek and why her eyes are so sad and so very hopeless.

He wants to wrap his arms around her and never let go.

He wants the pain to stop.

  
  


She reaches out.  Runs her hand down his face, just a trace of her fingertips, heartbreakingly gentle.

And then whispers, “Killian.”

  
  


There is so much she wants to tell him.

Of how they fought for their lives not long after drinking punch in a backyard strung with Chinese lanterns.  Of how they followed the river until they found this factory.

Of how they defended it against ambush after ambush, of the lives they lost in those first months alone.  How they all nearly starved that first, cold winter.

 

Of all the times she tried to go after him, to go look for him, to fight her way south.

And how she never made it more than thirty miles out.

How the last time nearly cost her her life, and she just barely made it back, an arrow shaft buried deep in her shoulder.  She will never raise her left hand above her head again.

It seems too small a price to pay.

 

And how it left her here, in this endless loneliness, just marking the days.  One after another.

The days without him.

  
  


But in the end they don’t talk.

They stay silent.

They both lean forward and her lips press to his and his lips press to hers, because this, this is what they truly mean to say.

The only thing they have to say.

 

I love you.

I will always, always, always love you.

  
  
  
  
  


**********

  
  
  


He walks in as she scratches line number 986 on the wall.  Her hand stills when she hears him close the door and her shoulders slump a fraction.

“Emma,” he says.

It’s always the first word when they’re alone in this room, her name, always.

Outside these four walls she is never Emma, and he is never Killian.  She is The Leader and he is the captain. In the heat of a fight she is sometimes Swan, and he is sometimes Jones.  Usually followed by words like  _ ‘duck!’ _ or  _ ‘on your left! _ ’

But in here, in here she is Emma.

  
  


It has been 234 days since she found him by a stream.

33 weeks.

More than eight months.

And she’s still marking time.

 

They have fallen into leadership together, mostly because they are never apart.

Never out of earshot.

Rarely out of sight of each other, and never out of sight outside of the compound.

It’s almost eerie the way they communicate in perfect synch, often without speaking.  They know each other’s thoughts just by looking, by way of a quirked mouth or a raised eyebrow or a certain gaze.

  
  


She leans her forehead against the wall and drops the hand holding the knife.  He walks up behind her, puts his arms around her waist, pulls her back against him.

“Emma,” he says again, softly, and kisses her neck.

And slowly, slowly her muscles loosen, and she leans into him.  

It always takes her a while to strip the leader down to the person.  To let the Lieutenant bleed out, to let Emma come up for air. And it’s taking longer the more time she marks.

But Killian has learned to be a patient man, and so he waits as her body molds to his, bit by small bit.

 

In the end she lets the knife fall to the floor and turns towards him, just lets go and slumps until the only thing holding her upright are his arms.  She tilts her head up and he kisses her, soft and warm and slow.  
Like his love for her is.  
Like their life outside isn’t.  
She smiles up at him and it’s tender and gentle; he sighs and holds her closer and it’s finally just them. 

Not the people they have to be for the others.  Just the people they can be, they are, for themselves.

 

They lie down together, in this space of  _ JustUs _ ; she wraps herself around him, and he pushes into her, languid, unhurried.  This time, it belongs to them.

  
  


“Killian,” she whispers as he starts moving inside her, and he knows she is Emma now, nothing but Emma.

“Killian,” she repeats, and it is the way she says it that tells him she needs to talk.  She does this often; talk just after he enters her, as he starts to move slowly. As if she needs all of him to listen, needs reassurance of his presence, of what she means to him.

He smiles, because  it makes her feel better.  And because he hopes that someday, someday she won’t need him to be inside her to talk about the things which are private, which are raw and vulnerable and close to her heart.

 

With an effort he stills and looks at her expectantly.

“Yes, love,” he says, and bends down to kiss her.

 

“I want to leave this place,” she finally says.

He waits.  She’s not finished.

“There are islands all up and down the East Coast,” she goes on.  “Lots of them. Some have to be deserted. You’re a sailor. You could get us somewhere, somewhere…”

She has to take a deep breath.  He can feel it down the length of his body.

“I want to pack up everything and take whoever wants to come, but most of all---” her breath hitches.  He presses his forehead to hers. 

“I can’t stay here,” she whispers.  “I can’t keep just existing. I want to stop marking time.” She looks at him and her eyes are burning.  “I  _ have to  _ stop marking time.  I have to start living.  Again. With you.”

 

He lets out a shuddering breath, one it feels like he’s been holding for years.

Years.

Because here it is, finally.  Hope.

 

Her legs wrap around him and he starts moving again and suddenly it’s no longer slow and sweet; it is faster and faster and more and more forceful, her legs pulling him close, her mouth wet against his, her eyes locked on to his, like a promise,  _ a promise _ \----

and she screams, out loud, as her walls tighten around him,

and he slams two more thrusts, and gets ready to pull out

_ ThisIsNoWorldForChildren _

but her legs don’t let go, wrap tighter, pull harder and harder---

until he comes.   _He_ _comes_.

_ Inside her _ .

 

She looks up at him, tears in her eyes, and he has never, ever loved her more.

And he was wrong before.

Here it is.

_ Hope _ .

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
